


Ghost in the Machine

by urami



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Graphic Depictions of Illness, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Rating May Change, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-05-27 18:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6295426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urami/pseuds/urami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a prompt on tfa-kink. </p>
<p>Hux had always thought there was something weird about the computer onboard the Finalizer. It was able to run strangely accurate simulation programs, and it seemed to like some of the officers onboard better than others- for some it would just send up snarky error messages instead of crashing at random and causing a loss of data, but Hux always just thought it was an imperfect AI. </p>
<p>And then one night, he heard a voice coming from his personal terminal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When he first came aboard the Finalizer, Tarkin Hux found that the computer system was… a little different than normal.

For one thing, it was alarmingly sentient, and very clearly had different users that it liked better than others. If it didn’t approve of whoever was trying to get it to work, it would lock itself down and spit out sarcastic error messages. If it liked (well, more accurately, didn’t hate) whoever was trying to use it, it would still spit out sarcastic error messages, but it would do whatever it was supposed to do eventually. And it _remembered_ things. Not in the way that a normal computer would save information in its databanks, but more like a droid’s dynamic recollection process. But even that was not a perfect comparison- sometimes it would seem as though the computer actually _forgot_ information, the way a sentient organic being would. But that was ridiculous. It was just a highly advanced piece of machinery, it couldn’t _forget_ things. Hux brushed the anomalies off as some stupid minion misplacing a data stick or something, and the computer’s programmed personality being sarcastic about it.

That alone would have been enough to make the computer strange, but it also had a strange program that was extremely accurate at making predictions. Not perfect, of course, the computer couldn’t account for every possible variable that could happen in a battle, or always accurately predict human behavior, but about eighty to ninety percent of the time, the predictions from the simulations it ran were so correct it was almost spooky. Hux had asked Snoke about it once, but the Supreme Leader had just smirked and told him, “the programmers were very good at their jobs.” And that was that. The official explanation was the _only_ explanation that made any sense. After all, what else could it be? Hux didn’t really understand much about computers, but he knew they weren’t people. And no matter how many times some of the junior officers muttered to themselves about the damn computer being haunted, that wasn’t an explanation either. Ghosts had better things to do than play around in machinery and taunt First Order officers. Even if sometimes it did seem like the computer knew too much about human anatomy to be able to come up with such creative insults.

Still, there was something about the system that unsettled Hux. And it didn’t help that sometimes, he felt like there was someone watching him from the other side of the screen. It was ridiculous, and such superstition was unbecoming of a First Order officer, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. It made him uncomfortable, and he really did prefer to leave operations of the computer to Mitaka- it seemed to like him better anyway. At least it never shut itself down or dumped the data when that skinny lieutenant tried to use it- it just insulted him and pulled random files up to the screen. Even though, of course, the feeling he had was probably just paranoia from hearing some of the scary stories the Stormtroopers told to freak each other out. Of course the computer wasn’t haunted by the ghost of a Stormtrooper who had died in an industrial accident while building the proton cannons, and it also wasn’t haunted by the ghost of an officer who committed suicide after her affair with a trooper was discovered. It wasn’t haunted by any kind of ghost at all! That was just stupid.

So of course, he almost had a heart attack when he woke up in the middle of the night, a young man’s pained voice calling out to nobody reverberating from a speaker embedded in his personal computer system.

“There’s no one… no one left… I wish I could die, I want to die, why won’t someone kill me? Please let me die.”

“Who’s there?!” Hux practically shouted, looking around his quarters wildly, illogically- he’d already determined it was coming from the computer.

There was a pained sound, a cough, and then… “You can hear me?”

“Yes…” Hux replied, hesitantly. The computer laughed. It was not a pleasant sound- bitter, malicious, and it trailed off into more of those sickly-sounding coughs.

“Are you a ghost?” Hux found himself asking when the coughing died down. Maybe there was something to the “haunted computer” theory after all- what if the ghost had died of disease, and that’s why it was coughing even now? Of course, that only set the voice off into another bitter round of laughter.

“A ghost?” it asked back, incredulous. “You seriously think I’m a ghost?”

“Well, everyone says the computer is haunted,” Hux answered, feeling very stupid. Apparently the voice in the computer was just as sarcastic as its pop-up messages.

“It’s not,” the voice replied, before coughing again, “Not yet anyway. I don’t know what will happen when I finally die.” Another laugh. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve been dead for a while, I just have to wait for my body to catch up with the rest of me.”

“If you want to die so badly, why don’t you end it yourself?” Hux asked. While suicide wasn’t particularly common in the First Order, it also wasn’t completely unheard-of. There was the lieutenant who’d thrown herself out an airlock after Phasma had discovered the relationship she had been in with a Stormtrooper, and everyone still talked in hushed whispers of the time that a computer technician had stabbed himself in the abdomen, then slit his own throat with the remainder of his strength on the bridge, right in front of everyone. It had been bloody- so bloody, and the man had laughed as he died, cursing the First Order and everyone in it. Even Phasma, who’d seen more death up close than probably everyone else put together, said it was one of the most disturbing things she’d ever seen. If this voice in the computer really wanted to die, there were ways to do it, weren’t there?

“I’ve tried,” came the disgruntled response. “You think I haven’t tried? I’ve tried every day of my miserable life. But that bastard made it impossible. I collapse before I can do anything.” Another violent coughing fit. Once it had calmed down, the voice continued. “Look, just forget about this. Go back to sleep. I apologize for waking you.”

“I can’t do that,” Hux replied.

“Why not? Nobody gave a damn about me before, and you’re not going to convince me you do after talking to me for five minutes.”

“I’m talking to a suicidal computer. That’s not the sort of thing you can easily forget.”

The voice laughed. “You still think I’m a computer? Maybe it’s better that way. Like I said, just forget about it. It’s not going to matter in a few days, I don’t think I have much time left.” And that was that. No matter what Hux said, he couldn’t get the computer to respond to him.

Uneasily, he crawled back into his bed and tried to go back to sleep, but sleep never came. He knew he shouldn’t care, he knew the computer enjoyed messing with users, as much as a computer could enjoy anything, but he had gotten a sense of abject despair from the machine’s words. What if there was more to the system than he thought?

 

* * *

The next day, Hux paid a visit to the systems maintenance department and spoke with a dour-faced man who introduced himself as the department head. “Where is the central drive of the system kept?” Hux asked him. The man looked at him blankly.

“In the mainframe room of course,” he replied.

“Take me there, immediately,” Hux ordered. The department head looked uncomfortable.

“Supreme Leader Snoke informed me that I was not to allow anyone to access that part of the ship,” he informed the general. “I apologize, but I cannot allow you to do that.”

“Is the Supreme Leader on the ship now?” Hux snapped. “I understand your concerns, but this is a matter of the ship’s safety. There may be a problem within the computer itself- doors have been opening and closing at random,” he lied. “If you want to die horribly because there was faulty wiring that opened the airlock while you were standing next to it, be my guest, but I would prefer to stay alive. Sanitation thinks the problem may require high-level credentials to fix, within the computer itself. As I said, if you want to die then feel free to ignore the problem. I would suggest that you do as I order you to.”

“I haven’t noticed any doors opening…” the other man said suspiciously. Hux rolled his eyes, drew his blaster, and held it to the man’s head. The man’s eyes widened, to the point that they looked like they were about to pop out of his head.

“I will not ask you again,” Hux said. “Take me to the mainframe room, or I’ll kill you and get someone else to do it.”

The department head looked like he was having an argument with himself, but eventually gave up. “Fine, but if the Supreme Leader finds out about it, this was your idea.”

“Of course, of course,” Hux said lazily, putting the blaster away. “Now get on with it.”

The other man led him down a part of the ship he’d never been before. At first he tried to explain what everything did, but Hux made his lack of interest very clear, and he gave up. Finally, they stopped in front of a heavy door, deep in the interior of the ship. “This is where the core of the systems is located,” he informed the general.

“What are you waiting for?” Hux snapped. “Open it up!”

“Open it, sir?” the systems tech asked. “What do you mean, open it?”

“Exactly what I said, you idiot. Open the door.”

“I can’t do that!”

“Oh yes?” Hux asked, smirking. “I wonder what would happen if I just shot the lock out. Would it open then?”

“Please don’t do that, sir.”

“Then open the door.”

“I can’t do that!” the other man reiterated.

“Fine then,” Hux said, drawing his blaster again. “I would stand back if I were you, I don’t know if it will ricochet.”

“Please don’t do that! Fine, fine, I’ll open it! You’re a lunatic!” The systems tech shrieked, digging around in his pockets to find a key. Hux would never admit it, but the man’s utter panic was actually pretty funny. Now he knew why some of the other officers liked to mess with Mitaka- the lieutenant overreacted to everything, and got scared easily. This guy seemed to be much the same way, and there was something sadistically satisfying about watching him squirm.

The systems tech stuck the key in the lock, turned it, and both men watched as the door swung open.

“What the fuck,” Hux muttered. The tech looked horrified, even more horrified than he had when Hux held a blaster to his head.

“I had no idea, I swear, I don’t know who this is, I had no idea he was in here! If I’d known-“

“Shut up,” Hux snarled.

It looked like something from a trashy holodrama, but a million times worse. There was a man imprisoned within the tiny room, a heavy chain shackling his ankles to one of the walls. There was a small chair with a keyboard set up, a bed, and a toilet in the corner. The man himself was deathly pale, with an alarming gray tinge to his skin, as though he hadn’t seen even starlight in years, and thin- painfully thin. It was clear that the only thing keeping him alive was the IV line stuck into his arm- it had to be, there wasn’t any evidence of food or water otherwise. There was blood splattered everywhere- on the walls, on the floor, down the man’s front, and a thin line of it trailed from his mouth. There was a pile of red-stained rags in the corner- at one point it looked like it had been a blanket, but it seemed as though the imprisoned man had torn it up in order to make bandages some time ago.

The man blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the sudden light flooding his prison in order to focus on whoever had opened the door. He opened his mouth to try to say something, but all that came out was more of those horrible hacking coughs that Hux had heard the night before. The general watched, disturbed, as the man doubled over, blood spraying from his mouth as he coughed. Once he’d managed to get his breath back, he looked up again, blinking confusedly at his visitors.

“You are the voice from the computer,” Hux stated. It wasn’t a question.

“I spoke to you,” was the man’s response.

“Yes. Last night.”                                

“I thought I told you to forget about it,” the dark-haired man said, wiping the blood he’d coughed up from his face with one of the dirty rags.

“And I said I wouldn’t be able to forget about a conversation with a suicidal computer,” Hux replied. “But you’re not a computer. And you’re dying anyway.”

“I never said I _was_ a computer,” the man responded. “And I told you I was dying.”  

Hux didn’t address that. “So you’re the reason the computer system is so alive. Because you are actually alive- _you’re_ the CPU. And you are the one who runs those simulations, I bet.”

“Yes, that’s true.” The man looked like he was going to say something else, but coughed violently again. At least this time, his blood stayed within his body, but the hacking coughs looked excruciatingly painful, and it took him even longer to be able to breathe normally. “Well, get on with it, then.”

“Get on with it?” Hux asked, blankly.                                       

“You have a blaster,” the man said, as though he was talking to a particularly slow-witted child. “Kill me already.”

Hux stared. It was true, the man was in very poor health, and likely would die anyway, but there was something viscerally upsetting about being told, flat-out, to kill someone he was looking right at. It was one thing to kill someone in the middle of a fight, or a battle, but this… the man had closed his dark eyes, bowed his head, and just accepted the inevitability of death.

Hux had never seen anyone so calmly accept their own death before. And while part of him acknowledged that it might be kinder to kill the man before he choked to death on the blood he coughed up, another part of him raged against the idea. He had been raised to fight against one’s own death, to never give up and accept the inevitable, and only to die when all of his other options had been exhausted. Anything else would disgrace his family and the First Order.

The doctors aboard the Finalizer were some of the best in the galaxy. If anyone would be able to save this man, they would.

“Stand back,” Hux ordered the computer tech, who jumped back as though he’d been burned. Eyes still closed, the dark-haired man smirked.

Hux drew his blaster again, ignoring the noise of protest the tech made, and aimed it. He squeezed the trigger, and watched as the energy bolt severed the chains trapping the man in the room. The shackles fell away with a clank, and Hux put the blaster away.

“Your aim sucks,” the man said.

Hux ignored him, and turned to the technician. “Give me your communicator,” he ordered. Silently, the man handed it over, and Hux switched the channel. “This is Tarkin Hux,” he snapped. “I need a medical team down in the mainframe room immediately!”

Everything that happened after that was a blur. The medical team arrived, took one look at the scene in that room, and started swarming around like rathtars in a feeding frenzy. One of the nurses actually shrieked in horror when the man fell into another coughing fit and splattered more of his blood everywhere.

The man didn’t seem to appreciate the attention, and tried to fight off the doctors and nurses when they put him on the stretcher, but he wasn’t strong enough to do much damage, or even prevent being manhandled into getting medical treatment. He swore and fought and bit and scratched, but his imprisonment and malnourishment made his struggles futile. All he could do was curse Hux and the doctors as they carted him off to the medical bay, and beg whoever would listen to just kill him already, howl that he didn’t want treatment, and bemoan the fact that nobody was listening to him.

* * *

 

Two days later, Hux found himself in the medical bay, speaking with one of the highest-ranking doctors, an older woman who looked like she’d seen just about everything, good and bad, that the galaxy could dish out, but the way she was shaking her head and looking grim was probably not a good sign.

“I have no idea how he survived this long,” she said. “He sustained massive internal organ damage that probably should have killed him- instead, his body attempted to heal itself, although that may have caused more problems than it solved. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I think he may be a Force user,” Hux replied. The woman nodded.

“That was my thought as well. The medical establishment doesn’t really understand the effects of the Force on the bodies of sentient beings that can control it. But that’s not the half of it- I don’t think he’s eaten any solid food in years, his stomach has shrunk. He also has the absolute worst lung infection any of us have ever seen- we can’t even identify whatever pathogen it is. By all rights, he should be dead. He _would_ have been dead in a few days if you hadn’t found him.” She looked around, as though checking for eavesdroppers, and then continued: “Sir, if I may- whoever trapped him in that room didn’t just put him in there and forget about him. Someone had a reason for putting him in there, and it appears as though he wasn’t just tortured.”

“What do you mean?” Hux asked. The doctor grimaced.

“I have been a doctor for a long time,” she stated flatly. “I was with the Empire, and I treated survivors from the collapse of the Death Star, what few there were. I have served the First Order since it came into being, and I have seen a lot of injuries and illnesses. I am well familiar with the sorts of injuries that can occur from a variety of activities. If I may, I would suggest that you conduct an inquiry as to who put him there, because they didn’t just put him there and leave him. Whoever did it has been torturing him regularly.”

“That’s not possible,” Hux said. “That room was sealed, the only one who had a key was the department head of systems maintenance, and he had no idea there was anyone in that room. It looked like it hadn’t been opened since the ship was constructed.”

“Like I said before,” the doctor seemed to ignore Hux. “The medical establishment doesn’t really understand very much about the Force. But if I had to make a guess based on what I remember from my days working for the Empire, whoever was torturing this man was using the Force to do it.”

“Can I speak to him?” Hux asked.

“You can try,” the doctor replied. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up that he’ll tell you anything, though.”


	2. Chapter 2

Hux wasn’t really sure what to expect when he saw the man he’d rescued again, but a glower and a greeting of “you bastard” certainly wasn’t it.

“I saved your life,” he replied coldly, noting that the man was strapped down securely, like a prisoner that was expected to attack the jailor when food or water was brought.

“You condemned me to a long drawn-out death is what you did,” the dark-haired man snarled. “Your type is all the same, you think you know what’s best for the entire galaxy and you don’t care who you torture or how many lives you destroy in order to create your own short-sighted little utopia! But by not killing me, you’ve not only condemned me, you’ve condemned your own idiotic self!”

“Most of the time people beg me to _not_ kill them,” Hux replied. “Perhaps you’d enlighten me as to what you mean by that. Who are you, and how did you come to be trapped on my ship?”

The other man smirked bitterly. “Wow. You really have no idea, do you?”

“If I did I wouldn’t be wasting my time talking to someone who obviously just wants to jump out the nearest airlock,” Hux answered.

The dark-haired man laughed again, his laughter turning into coughing again, as it had done the other night. Hux was somewhat relieved to see that it didn’t seem to last as long as it had before, however, and the amount of blood he spat up was less than previously. The First Order doctors truly were the best in the galaxy.

“Believe me, if I could jump out of the airlock I would, but I still have the same problem I have had, I collapse before I can do anything that would end my life. That bastard really thought everything through. I can’t die until he’s damn well ready to let me, or until someone decides to put me out of my misery.” More coughing. “To answer your question, I suppose you can call me Ben. As to how I ended up on this ship, the answer to that is that I’m an idiot. There, are you happy now?”

Hux was not happy, but he refrained from commenting on it. Ben would probably only have some snarky response, and if he was going to keep trading obnoxious commentary with the dark-haired man, nothing was ever going to get done. As it was they were still running around in circles. Instead, he decided to try a different tactic. “You keep mentioning this ‘bastard,’” he began. “Would you be able to tell me who he is?”

Ben laughed bitterly. “Who else? The so-called Supreme Leader of the First Order. Snoke.”

“The Supreme Leader?!” Hux gasped. Ben smirked.                              

“Surely you didn’t think he was a benevolent dictator, did you? No, he decided I was no longer of any use to him, but he didn’t want to kill me. What fun is it to kill your favorite toy if it’s not broken yet? No, he decided to put me somewhere I’d be out of the way, but where he could still violate me at his leisure. He decided his flagship needed a ‘state-of-the-art’ computer, so he trapped me in there and forced me to do all the menial tasks that a computer would do, and then he’d use the damn Force to keep me in line, and for his own entertainment.”

“By entertainment, you mean…”

“Do I really have to spell it out for you?” Ben looked disgusted. “Even before he trapped me in that room, I was his little pet, the only difference is that after he sent me away he did everything through the Force rather than with his body.”

Hux felt sick. He didn’t want to believe it. But how many times had he felt like the Supreme Leader was imagining things he didn’t want to know when he looked at him? How many times had he wondered if he really was doing the right thing? He was fighting to restore the former glory of the Empire, regain the dignity that his family had lost in the collapse, but how many times had he wondered about Snoke’s policies and if they really were for the best?

The Empire had at least been honorable, allowing captured worlds to swear their allegiance to the government and avoid wholesale slaughter. Hux’s own mother had come from one of those worlds; if the Empire had applied Snoke’s policy of immediate destruction with no notice to her planet, Hux likely wouldn’t even exist. But he’d never imagined that the Supreme Leader would do anything like… what this Ben was accusing him of.

He couldn’t deal with it. Turning on his heel, Hux fled the medical bay, pretending he didn’t see Ben’s disappointed expression.

* * *

Despite the disturbing nature of their encounter, Hux didn’t have much time to dwell on the information Ben had given him. First, Lieutenant Mitaka had come down with a terrible case of the Kuyper pox, and had to be evacuated to the quarantine facility on Starkiller Base before the pathogens spread through the recirculated air and infected the entire crew. Upon arrival at the weapon, Hux was informed that there had been a setback with the construction. Apparently the building materials for the proton cannons had to be imported from one of the Outer Rim worlds, and the Resistance had taken it upon itself to set up a blockade between the source-world and one of the other planets that served as a refueling station. One of the ships had attempted to force its way through, only to be blown up.

Hux really hated the Resistance. How the hell had they even known that the transport ships were First Order? It’s not like the ships had the sigil of the organization painted on the side! All First Order transport ships were flagged as belonging to a neutral planet, usually one of the planets that was known as a pirate world. In general they didn’t care one way or another who flew their colors. Was there a mole somewhere? No, that wasn’t possible- none of the troops would know how to contact the Resistance, none of the officers would commit treason like that, and none of the transport crews were suicidal enough to run the risk of being executed by either the First Order or the Resistance. There must have been another explanation. There were some neutral planets in that area of space- maybe the Resistance had business at one of them or the other and had thought there was something suspicious about the ships. That had to be it.

Hux was in the middle of a discussion about the building delays with Lieutenant Parsons, one of the engineers in charge of the project, when his communicator chirped. “What?” he barked into it, aggravated.

“General Hux, sir? This is Doctor Arkkriss, of the Finalizer.” Hux recognized the voice of the female doctor who had explained Ben’s medical status to him a week earlier. “Please return to the medical bay at once… we need your orders as to how to proceed.”

“What’s wrong?” the general asked.

“Ah… it’s probably best if you come here and see it for yourself…” came the reply. “The patient you asked us to treat… he’s not doing well.”

“Explain,” Hux demanded.

“He had a lung hemorrhage,” the doctor replied. “We were able to aspirate most of the blood from his lungs, but he’s still in severe respiratory distress and is showing signs of going into septic shock. I have never seen anything like it. We await your orders on whether to continue treating him, or to let him die. It would probably be best if you saw the situation firsthand before making a final decision, sir.”

Before Hux even really could process what he was doing, he had terminated the connection on his communicator, made an excuse to Lieutenant Parsons, and started off at a full run back towards his ship. He didn’t know why he was doing it. Why did he care so much, whether or not that man died? He didn’t even know him, and the few sentences they had exchanged had been full of vitriol and bitterness. Ben was essentially suicidal anyway. He’d begged for Hux to kill him the first time they’d met. Maybe it would just be kinder to let him die, to order the doctors to stop treating him. Obviously it was what the man would want. Maybe he’d even gone so far as to sabotage the medical equipment in order to let himself die naturally.

Really, there just wasn’t a good reason to continue trying to save someone who didn’t want to be saved. But at that moment, Hux didn’t really care much for reason. For some reason he just wanted to keep Ben alive, no matter what.

* * *

The medical bay on the Finalizer looked like the aftermath of a battle. The doctors and nurses were covered in blood, and it was splattered everywhere, even moreso than the tiny room Ben had been imprisoned in. The man in question was unconscious again, and hooked up to several medical droids and an oxygen tank, a mask covering his nose and mouth. Even with all of the equipment keeping him alive, it was clear he was fading fast.

Doctor Arkkriss stood to greet Hux, her previously blue scrubs now bright red and dark brown. “General Hux,” she stated.

“Doctor,” Hux responded.

“As you can see, we’re doing everything we can to keep him alive, but it doesn’t seem to be helping,” she explained. “His system is rejecting the drugs we’ve been using to treat the infection- in fact, we think that is what triggered the hemorrhage. The red droid is a blood-replenishing unit, but even with us supplying it with the raw materials it needs to manufacture new blood, it cannot keep up with the demand. The gray and black droid is an aspirator- it suctions the blood out from the patient’s lungs, but we have to empty its collection tray at least once an hour. The third droid is providing medicine, but we’ve disconnected that one temporarily until we can be sure that wasn’t what caused the hemorrhage.”

Hux nodded. “And you’re sure that’s what caused it?”

“I think so,” the doctor replied. “Although to be honest with you, it could have been anything. As I mentioned before, we’ve never seen anything like this, not even in the educational holos from medical school.” She paused, looking thoughtful. “Right before the hemorrhage began, however, he tried to say something. Nobody caught what it was- it was probably nothing, or he was trying to warn us that it was coming.”

“I see,” Hux said, looking dispassionately at the unconscious man. How horrifying would it be to know you were about to start bleeding out from the mouth and nose? He shuddered, not wanting to imagine it. Such unpleasantness was best left unexamined.

“What do you want us to do?” the doctor asked. “Really, it might be kinder to disconnect him from the droids and let him die. He’s been asking us to do that since you brought him here.”

Hux replied immediately. “No. Do whatever you can to keep him alive. I still have questions for him.”

“Sir,” the woman inclined her head, not voicing her thoughts. _If you really had questions for him, why didn’t you come here while he was awake and alive?_ It really was counter-intuitive, but then again, who was she to question the motives and tactics of a general of the First Order? For years it had been her duty to serve first the Galactic Empire without questioning the orders of her superiors, and after that regime had fallen, she had gone to the First Order with the other survivors. In her line of work, she had seen a lot, and dealt with a lot. She’d seen the aftermath of torture and rape, serious illness, suicides, and she’d treated survivors from the Death Star. In all her years of medical treatment, she’d never seen anything as brutal as what had been done to the man the general had brought in for treatment. By all rights, the man shouldn’t even be alive, but he’d held on this long, despite his clearly stated desire to die.

But Doctor Arkkriss also wasn’t stupid enough to ignore a direct order to keep treating the man, even if she thought it was futile. After spending so long in her line of work, the doctor well understood the inevitability of death. Everyone eventually dies, but she was also in no hurry to speed up her own death through being executed for treason.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, thank you all for the feedback! I'm glad you're enjoying it so far! 
> 
> If you'd like to read ahead, this gets posted a little at a time (usually in between line breaks) on the TFA kink meme here: http://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/3467.html?thread=6753419#cmt6753419 
> 
> It will be cleaned up and posted here every few days, or whenever I have enough to be a whole chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

The last thing Ben Solo remembered was an excruciatingly painful stabbing feeling in his lung, and then what seemed like a veritable explosion of blood. The last thing he remembered was the frantic beeping of one of the medical droids he’d been connected to before the darkness took him.

When he awoke, the first thing he thought was that the medical bay he’d been in had been bombed, but as he looked around, he realized that wasn’t what he was seeing. He was in some sort of infirmary, true, but everything was so much _grayer_ and... dead-looking, than the Finalizer’s medical bay. None of the corpses strewn around were of the doctors who had been looking after him, and upon closer inspection, this room was in an actual building, rather than a starship. Looking out the window, he realized he was not on any planet he recognized- at least, if it was, it was no longer a world that could support life. The barren ground had no vegetation except for a few blackened, scorched trees, and a red sun beat heavily down on the landscape.

He was so focused on looking around at his surroundings that he didn’t notice one of the corpses in the infirmary begin to drag its torso across the ground with its arms, towards him, until it reached up with a decayed, clawed hand and grasped his ankle. Startled, Ben looked down only to see the dead eyes of a teenage girl staring up at him. Coagulated blood poured from the thing’s mouth as it hissed his name, clawing at his legs.

Horrified, he realized he recognized this creature. At one point, in life, it had been a girl he’d known- she had been another one of his uncle’s students. He couldn’t remember what he name was now, but he remembered striking her down like he’d only done it yesterday. She’d tried to protect some of the youngest students at the academy- she’d jumped in front of them to shield them from his saber. It had been futile, really- he’d sliced her cleanly in half, killing her instantly, then killed the younger children anyway. At the time, he’d laughed at her stupidity- no one would stand in the way of the Supreme Leader’s goals, it was foolish, essentially suicidal, to try, but now, here he was, dead because of that same Supreme Leader. Who was getting the last laugh now? He wasn’t really sure what a bloodied, semi-undead corpse missing half of its body would be able to do to him- after all, it seemed he was already dead- but it looked as though he would be punished all the same.

All around the room, more of the bodies started moving towards him- some he recognized as people he’d killed himself, others he suspected were victims of plans he and Snoke had put into motion while he was still in the Supreme Leader’s good graces, and still others he thought must have been killed by the First Order, using the information he’d provided as the “computer.” All of them scraped, dragged, shuffled, and lurched their way towards him, crying out their condemnations of his actions. Blindly, Ben kicked out, trying to drive them off, but they just kept coming. Was this the fate of murderers, to be haunted after their own deaths by the spirits of their victims?

Suddenly, a woman’s voice rang out, clearer than any of the groans of the corpses. “Begone! You have no right to him, he is not one of you!” Hissing, the walking corpses drew back.

Ben turned in the direction of the voice, and blinked. A beautiful woman in an elaborate dress, with a complex hairstyle, was shooing the creatures away, coming towards him. “Ignore them, they cannot actually harm you.” Then, she took a closer look at him, and visibly recoiled. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here! Go back!”

Ben didn’t respond to the woman’s order. “What are they? Where am I? Am I dead?” he asked.

“I’m not exactly sure what they are,” the woman replied. “All I know is that they’re not whatever they appear to be- they take the form of whatever you fear and then attack you, even though they cannot do anything to you. You’re not quite dead yet, but this is where you go if your death was caused by someone else. I’m dead, but you’re not. You need to go back!”

Ben took a closer look at the woman, and realized that her dress was soaked through from the waist down with blood. Just like him, whatever had killed this woman had been bloody, and messy, and likely painful. The woman shook her head. “You’re not supposed to die yet! My husband and I wait here for our children, you weren’t supposed to come before them! You don’t understand, you need to go back.”

Ben snorted. “Ma’am, I’m sorry about your children, but I won’t go back. If this is death, I have no intention of returning. I’ve been trying to get here for years. I tried to kill myself multiple times, I begged the man who found me to kill me, and I tried to get the doctors to let me die! Now that I’ve finally gotten my wish, I intend to stay dead.”

“Do you think I wanted to die in childbirth because my husband was reckless, stubborn, and angry?” the woman snapped. “Do you think my husband wanted to die right after he got to meet his son? We didn’t get to choose these things! But you still have a body to go back to. You must go back. The reason you are coughing up blood is because there is an improperly installed killswitch in your lungs. Snoke put it there to kill you if you ever disobeyed his orders, but it wasn’t done right. If you can get the doctors to remove it, you will recover, and you will be able to help destroy the man who did this to you.”

She paused to let that sink in, then continued. “My husband has always been able to see potential futures, even when he was alive. It’s what caused him to accidentally kill me while I was in labor- he was trying to prevent my death. Being dead, he can see even more potentialities. If you die here, billions more will die. The man who found you- Tarkin Hux- he will fall under Snoke’s control, and he will slaughter entire systems with the push of a button, until Snoke determines he is no longer of any use, and tortures him to death. That young dark-haired man- Dopheld Mitaka, I think his name was- he will rise to the top of the hierarchy until that Stormtrooper woman poisons him, only to be assassinated herself by one of her troopers. Snoke will kill every single one of the Stormtroopers as punishment, and then he will set his sights on your parents. He will kill your father quickly, but your mother...” She let herself trail off, then shook her head. “You must live on, if not for your own sake, if not for the sake of the galaxy, then for the sake of your family. While I want to see my children again, I do not want it to happen under those circumstances. Please, Ben, go back, you must go back.”

All of a sudden, Ben realized who the woman was, and why she seemed to be so familiar with him. All of a sudden, a half-remembered story came flooding back- his mother and uncle hadn’t been raised by their biological parents because their father- Darth Vader- had accidentally killed their mother while she was in labor. “Grandmother?” he asked. The woman smiled.

“I wish I could have met you under better circumstances. Your grandfather will be disappointed he didn’t get to see you, but there is no time, you must go now. Someday, however, you will get to meet us both. But now there is no time. Please, go back!”

“But how?” Ben asked.

“You are still alive. All you have to do is open your eyes.”

“Open my eyes?”

“Open your eyes!” Padme Amidala reiterated. “Focus, and open your eyes. And remember what I told you! You need to get that switch out of your lung, or you’ll end up right back here the next time your body tries to purge it! Now, go back!”

* * *

With a pained gasp, Ben’s eyes shot open. He was back in the medical bay of the Finalizer, the doctors lurking around, doing their various tasks. For once they weren’t gathered around his gurney looking at him like he was a particularly interesting specimen. A few of them were tending to a man Ben recognized as Dopheld Mitaka, who was wearing a breathing mask. Briefly, Ben’s heart stuttered- had what his grandmother warned about already happened? Had the other man been poisoned already? Then logic reasserted itself- Mitaka was lucid, and was only hooked up to an oxygen machine and one IV- it was probably just a minor illness.

Nobody seemed to have noticed that Ben was awake yet, so he coughed loudly. Everyone, including Mitaka, looked up in surprise. Ben waved his hand weakly, and the doctors immediately started swarming around him. The other man must have been stable enough, because even the medics attending to him came over in a hurry.

“I need you to remove something from my lungs,” he tried to say, but because his mouth was covered with an oxygen mask, it came out more like “Inffytrffsfffffmffflfff.”

“What’s he saying?” one of the doctors asked.

Doctor Arkkriss rolled her eyes, and disconnected the mask. “How are you feeling?” she asked Ben.

“I need you to remove something from my lung,” Ben repeated. “There’s something in there- it’s what’s killing me.”

“And how do you know that?”

Ben hesitated. If he said “I sort of died and met my grandmother, who told me that I had to live on to save the galaxy and that the Supreme Leader put a device in my lung to kill me if I ever disobeyed him, but he didn’t install it right so now it’s killing me slowly” he would sound insane, and he might be put back under anesthesia for his own safety, and the safety of everyone else around him while he died, helpless to stop the horrible fate his grandmother had warned him about. He’d probably choke on his own blood and drown anyway. And while he still wasn’t convinced it was worth it to try to continue living, he also didn’t really want to have to face his grandmother again this quickly- how would she take his failure? And if what her husband, his grandfather, had foreseen came to pass, would he really be able to face his parents when they inevitably ended up in that same bleak afterlife with him?

There was also the possibility that the whole thing had just been an insane dream. Maybe it was simply his subconscious coming up with a ridiculous excuse to keep him alive. Was that a thing that was possible? It had seemed so real, though- but all dreams tended to seem real while you were dreaming them. Usually, though, on awakening it was obvious that the dream hadn’t been an actual event at all. This one still did.

But even if he did get them to operate on him, and there was nothing there, there was still the chance he wouldn’t survive the procedure. And wasn’t that what he wanted? He could die peacefully, and since he wouldn’t have committed suicide, whatever Snoke had done to him to prevent that wouldn’t kick in. Either way it was a win-win- if the dream hadn’t been a dream at all and there really was something there, he’d be able to get the switch removed and protect his mother from whatever Snoke intended to do to her. And if there wasn’t anything there, and he died, then he got his wish anyway.

Taking a breath, and immediately coughing in response, Ben waited until the fit passed before he continued. “I can feel it- there’s something there. I think the hemorrhage broke something loose, and now every time I try to breathe I can feel it moving around.”

“That’s not possible,” one of the other doctors said. “We did imaging and there was nothing there!”

Doctor Arkkriss looked thoughtful. “Doctor Eyeuro is right- we did do extensive testing on you at the request of General Hux, and we did not find anything internal that could be causing, ah, your problems,” she said delicately. “But that does not necessarily mean there is nothing there,” she added, with a stern look at the other doctor. “You say you can feel it moving around when you breathe?”

“Yes,” Ben replied.

“We have orders from the general to keep you alive at all costs,” Doctor Arkkriss said. “If we were to do an exploratory surgery it would be very risky for you- you are still not stable, but if you are right, and there is really something in your lungs, another hemorrhage could kill you, and the risk involved in that would be even higher than that for the surgery. If we were to do this, we would need permission from the general. I’m not taking the risk without his knowledge.”

Ben had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Why did that guy care so much whether he lived or died? He’d known the man for only a few days, and they’d only met because the idiot hadn’t turned off his speakers before he went to sleep, and couldn’t help but follow the temptation to go find the “suicidal computer” he thought he’d been conversing with. They weren’t friends, they weren’t really even connected to each other at all.

Maybe the general found his predictions from using the Force useful? That had to be it- it was very useful for gaining a military advantage. If Ben died, he would lose that advantage.

“Fine,” he sighed. “Do what you have to do. But hurry, I don’t know how much longer I will be able to breathe with this thing loose.”

* * *

No matter how hard he tried, Hux couldn’t focus on doing his work. He had what seemed like a mountain of paperwork to fill out- Lieutenant Parsons, the main engineer of the weapon, had done some more calculations and had determined that they were going to need another ten tons of cured concrete and another four tons of plastine for the weapon, and now Hux was going to have to figure out a way to get an order of that size from one of the Outer Rim worlds to Starkiller Base without running into a Resistance blockade. Obviously a crew from a First Order-affiliated planet wouldn’t be able to get through, but space pirates were a notoriously unreliable lot. Maybe he could get a neutral planet to cough up a crew? The government of Coo’sa still owed the First Order a favor from the time they’d helped capture and kill the masterminds behind a plot to assassinate the teenage son of the planet’s king. No, that wasn’t going to work- that same prince was attending school in the New Republic, and King Durlosu was quite a bit less friendly towards the First Order as a result.

Any other option that he was able to come up with had other problems with it. Other planets that might have been willing to help at one point or another had already been assimilated into the First Order, or had been taken over as satellite states of the Republic. And now that he thought about it, he couldn’t think of a suitable pirate crew that would have been willing to work with them- Bala-Tik had dropped out of communication a while ago, Maka Bakune and her crew had been executed for their crimes by the New Republic, Han Solo was part of the Resistance and obviously wouldn’t be willing to help the First Order, Ryoro Nagemic and his crew hadn’t been heard from for over two years and were presumed dead, and Beathri Diala had taken time off from piracy because she’d gotten pregnant. That… was pretty much all of the pirates he knew enough about to decide whether or not to trust them. It was a problem, really- there wasn’t a directory of pirates one could consult to do quasi-legal building material runs. And the only pirate world Hux knew of was Takodana, which was well-known to be controlled by a Resistance-sympathizer.

Maybe Phasma would know someone he could use- she did seem to know everyone.

Just as Hux was starting to debate the merits of just taking the Finalizer, loading it up with a bunch more guns, and towing the building materials along behind it, his communicator chirped. Really hoping that it wasn’t Lieutenant Parsons with more bad news about how much more stuff he was going to need to finish the weapon, he answered it.

“Tarkin Hux here.”

“Sir?” It was a woman’s voice, so at least that meant it wasn’t Parsons. “This is Kannanon Arkkriss, from the medical bay. If you have a moment, I need you to come down here. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”

Hux felt his stomach sink- there were only two people currently in the medical bay, and he was certain that nothing good would require him to go down there. Either Mitaka had something more serious than the Kuyper pox, or something had gone wrong with Ben. “What’s going on?”

“It would probably be best if I spoke to you in person, but your patient thinks he can feel something rattling around in his lungs. His theory is that the hemorrhage, aa, knocked something loose for lack of a better way to put it and that it needs to come out. He wants us to do an exploratory surgery on him to try to find it.”

“Can’t you do imaging to find it instead of just cutting him open?”

“Well, that’s the problem,” the doctor replied. “We did do imaging and didn’t see anything. But we also did the imaging before the hemorrhage and it wasn’t safe to move him to do more of it once he’d fallen unconscious.”

“Then do the imaging now!” Hux snapped. And this woman was supposed to be an elite doctor?

“He won’t let us, he’s demanding we just anesthetize him and take it out immediately or he’s going to take the scalpel to his own chest,” came the response. “We managed to calm him down long enough to get him to agree to wait until we heard what you had to say about it first, considering you were the one who wanted him to stay alive.”

“He wouldn’t be able to do it himself,” Hux said. “He’s the one who keeps yelling about how he can’t be the one to kill himself, that would probably extend to doing surgery on himself as well. Do the imaging and then if you see anything, do the surgery.”

“Sir,” came the deferential reply, before the comm link closed.

Hux pressed his fingers to his temples. Once again, he found himself wondering two things- one, why he cared so much about what happened to this one man, and two, why this man seemed so determined to put himself through more torment. Hadn’t he already had enough of that? If what he was saying was true, he would have suffered unavoidably for years at Snoke’s hands. And Hux was beginning to tire of being the only one in that medical bay with any sense at all.


	4. Chapter 4

Ben glowered as one of the doctors ran a scanner over his chest, looking for anomalies in his lungs. He hadn’t reacted well to being told that Hux had only given permission for the operation if they were able to find something on a diagnostic image. His fury had actually manifested itself through the Force and caused all the machines to disconnect themselves from their power sources, leading to a tense few minutes as he’d immediately started coughing up blood again, and Mitaka was left gasping for air and scratching madly at the pockmarks marring his skin.

Luckily, the doctors were able to reconnect everything quickly enough that no permanent harm was done, but Dopheld Mitaka kept shooting him nervous looks. Well, Ben supposed he couldn’t blame him- he wouldn’t have been entirely comfortable if the situations had been reversed and someone else’s rage had caused _his_ medical equipment to fail.

But eventually, the younger man said something. “Is it true?” he whispered, voice barely audible over the whirring of his oxygen tubes.

“Is what true?” Ben asked.

“Don’t talk,” the doctor admonished, although it wasn’t clear who exactly he was talking to.

“Before I got sick I heard some of the other officers talking,” Mitaka replied. “They said that General Hux trapped you in the mainframe room because you had an affair with his mother.”

“What.” Ben stated flatly.               

“I thought it sounded crazy, so I said that wasn’t possible- Captain Phasma agreed with me, she said there was no way General Hux would have left you alive if you’d slept with his mother.”

“Yeah, no, I’ve never met the man’s mother, let alone slept with her,” Ben replied, wondering if he was still hallucinating. That was really only the reasonable explanation for the bizarre turn this conversation was taking. First he’d met his long-dead grandmother, and now he was being accused of an affair with some random woman.

“Stop talking!” the doctor said, somewhat more emphatically this time.

“That’s what I thought,” Mitaka said, before closing his eyes and leaning his head back on the pillow. Ben wondered what illness he had- while whatever it was clearly wasn’t as debilitating as what he’d been afflicted with, but it was strong enough to tire the other man out after talking just for a little while. Without anything to distract him, Ben sat still again and allowed the doctor to finish running the scanner over him, then waited patiently while the man looked at the results. A small frown appeared on his face.

“Wait here,” he said. “I need to double-check these results… that shouldn’t be possible.” He disappeared into the small office attached to the medical bay. A few minutes later, the man reappeared, Doctor Arkkriss following behind him.

“Extraordinary,” the older woman was saying, looking at the scanner with an expression of deep concentration. “If this isn’t an anomaly, then the fact that we didn’t detect this before is an unforgivable oversight. We _did_ do the lung scan before, didn’t we?”

“As soon as he was brought in coughing up blood,” the male doctor replied. “We did it several different times, in fact, and each time nothing at all was showing up. Is it possible the hemorrhage pushed something loose?”

“It shouldn’t have been,” Doctor Arkkriss said, shaking her head. “At least, it shouldn’t have been possible according to any medical logic, but the patient was saying something about he thought something had broken off inside of his lungs after the incident. And since we haven’t been able to identify whatever else could be causing his health problems, I suppose we really don’t have any room to be dismissing what should and should not be possible based on logic.” Dropping her voice, she continued, “as much as I hate to admit it, given the patient’s behavior, I thought it was another roundabout way of him trying to kill himself, by having us perform a risky surgery that he wasn’t likely to survive.” 

“There has got to be an easier way to kill yourself than that,” the other doctor said. Arkkriss shrugged.

“I don’t know why anyone does half the things they do, and I’ll be honest with you- this man definitely doesn’t seem entirely sane.”

“I can hear that, you know,” Ben groused.

Both Doctor Arkkriss and the other doctor had the good grace to look embarrassed. Clearing her throat, Arkkriss addressed Ben.

“I don’t know how you guessed this, but you were right- there does seem to be something in your lung that wasn’t there before. We’re going to do another scan to make sure it wasn’t a scanner error, but if we see the same thing, we will certainly do the surgery you requested.”

* * *

 

Once Hux finished his paperwork, he headed down to the medical bay. He tried to tell himself it was just to check up on Mitaka, but he knew that wasn’t it. Kuyper pox wasn’t fatal, it was just annoying and itchy, (and extremely contagious in the early stages) and he’d never cared before to go check on an officer who had fallen ill. There really wasn’t any way around it- he was worried about Ben.

It didn’t make any sense. Once again, he found himself trying to rationalize his behavior- he’d found a man trapped in the bowels of his ship, in very poor health. Hadn’t the doctors even said that Ben would have died shortly if Hux hadn’t saved him? Wasn’t it just human nature to try to keep someone alive if you had the ability to help them? He was on Hux’s ship, so that made him Hux’s responsibility. And anyway, cleaning up after a suicide was messy and irritating, it would only upset the troops and harm officer morale. That was all there was to it- it wasn’t like Hux intended to marry the man! No, wanting to make sure everything was efficient and clean was all there was to it. Not to mention that Hux still hadn’t managed to get all the information from Ben that he thought the other man had. If he was telling the truth, and hadn’t just gone insane from his prolonged confinement, it seemed that there was more to Snoke than the rest of the First Order knew.

His mother had never trusted Snoke, either, and it certainly wasn’t out of any misplaced sense of sympathy for the New Republic or the Resistance. Moa Hux had gone to her grave hating those organizations so fiercely that sometimes it scared her son. But then again, she had lost most of her family in a Rebellion-led bombing run during the days of the Empire, and then lost her eyesight while she was pregnant with her son when the New Republic ordered a strike on the Imperial refugee camp she and her husband had been living in. If there was anyone who ever had the right to hate, it was his mother, but she’d never trusted Snoke and had often berated Brendol for his decision to ally the First Order with the man.

Of course, Brendol Hux never appreciated Moa second-guessing him, and Tarkin had always thought his mother was being foolish- if Snoke would be able to bring the First Order to the level that the Empire had been, then she had no right to complain about any of his methods. After one particularly nasty argument, Brendol had thrown her blindness back in her face- she was a burden anyway, what did it matter what her thoughts on the Supreme Leader were?

Tarkin Hux had always been terrified of his father, but that day, his mother had frightened him more than his father ever had. Moa had laughed bitterly, her sightless eyes somehow focusing directly on Brendol. “I don’t expect you to understand,” she’d said. “How could I? You are still trapped in your glory days, reliving all the prestige you had at the Academy, but you are no longer a student. We no longer live in the Empire, and there are no greater officials to protect you from yourself. Tell me, if this Snoke ordered you to kill yourself, would you do it? I have no delusions that you’d hesitate if he ordered my death, or Tarkin’s, but you always were far too in love with your own life-“

Brendol had then struck her hard enough that she’d crumpled, the only time Tarkin had ever seen his father physically harm his mother, and snarled in reiteration that she didn’t understand anything and never had, then left the room without looking back. Moa had simply lain in a heap on the ground, laughing that horrible, mirthless laugh, her face twisted in a joyless rictus, before groping around until she found a chair and pulled herself up.

“Someday you will become the leader of millions within the First Order,” she told him, slapping his hand away when he’d tried to help her. “Every day you will need to make difficult decisions, but you must also remember to keep in mind that there’s more at stake than simply ruling the galaxy. People like your father, and the Supreme Leader, they become idiots blindly searching for power. Remember that Darth Vader’s ultimate goal at the beginning was to keep his wife and children alive. There’s more to life than blowing up planets.” Then, she’d just laughed again. “But certainly feel free to blow up plenty of planets, especially if they’re New Republic planets!”

Not too long after that day, Tarkin had gone to the Academy. He only saw his mother a few more times after that, at the holiday breaks. As long as he’d been alive, Moa had never been in very good health, but it seemed like the minute he’d left for the Academy, her health took a drastic downward spiral- she’d contracted a strange disease that none of the doctors had been able to cure.

With a horrible, sick jolt, he remembered the symptoms of the illness that had killed his mother. At the very end, his father had said her eyes had rolled back in her head, she’d coughed once, and a flood of blood had poured from her mouth- much like the lung hemorrhages that Ben had experienced.

Ben had blamed the Supreme Leader for his condition. Hux’s mother had died from a similar condition. Ben claimed that the Supreme Leader was killing him slowly.

If it was the same illness, then Tarkin Hux was only able to reach one conclusion: Snoke had murdered his mother.

Increasing the speed of his steps, Hux hurried down to the medical bay and flung open the door, only to stop dead in his tracks.

There was only one patient in the infirmary, and it was Dopheld Mitaka. The other bed was completely empty, even the bedding having been stripped from it.

* * *

 


	5. Chapter 5

Hux stared blankly at the empty bed. Even the sheets had been stripped, leaving only the plasticine mattress pad behind. He simply couldn’t believe what he was seeing- how was this even possible? He was fairly certain that there was a protocol in the cases where someone died in the medical bay that the scene not be disturbed until an investigation could be completed as to the cause of death. It was just standard procedure, really just a basic protocol to make sure that the doctors weren’t sabotaging the treatment of the individuals under their care. It was the standard operating procedure even when it was obvious how the person in question had died. Hux recalled an incident where a trooper who had been shot by a Resistance member survived long enough to make it into the medical bay just long enough to bleed to death. It was very obvious that the man had died from his wounds- there just hadn’t been any time to treat his wounds, he’d exsanguinated very quickly. But First Order protocol still demanded that the body and the medical equipment be left alone in order to determine that the man had, in fact, died of blood loss from a blaster shot.

So it didn’t make sense that they’d disposed of the body so quickly and cleaned up. What were they trying to hide? Hux’s jaw twitched, he was going to make sure that the medical bay staff faced a tribunal. At the very _least._

“Oh? General Hux, sir?” a voice snapped him out of his thoughts. Hux turned, and saw that Mitaka was sitting up in his bed, looking at him curiously. “Are you alright?”

“What happened?” he asked.

Mitaka blinked.

“What do you mean, what happened?”

“Why has this bed been stripped? Where is the body? Why isn’t proper protocol being followed?!” Hux fired off questions like blaster bolts, yelling at the poor lieutenant like he’d personally done something to the other man. Mitaka’s eyes just widened.

“Body? What body? He died in surgery?”     

Now, it was Hux’s turn to look confused. “Surgery?” Mitaka nodded.

“They did more tests and they found something in his lungs this time- they decided that they needed to take it out. I thought they’d told you.”

Now that he thought about it, Hux did remember his communicator beeping again while he was working on some paperwork, but because it wasn’t coming in on the emergency channel he had assumed it wasn’t that important and that a lower-ranking officer could have handled it. Clearly it seemed that he should have paid more attention.

Mitaka continued. “The nurse thought it would be a good idea to change his sheets while he was in the operating room, since he’s not supposed to get out of bed otherwise.”

“I see,” Hux replied, feeling like an idiot. What was it about Ben that made him behave so strangely? If it had been Mitaka who had disappeared from his bed, Hux wondered if he would have felt that same panic. Most likely he would have been irritated that procedure hadn’t been followed, but would he have felt that same existential terror on seeing the empty bed?

“E-excuse me, Lieutenant. Please have Doctor Arkkriss contact me when the surgery is completed,” he finally choked out, before fleeing the medical bay, leaving a very confused Mitaka behind.

“Was it something I did?” the lieutenant asked himself.

* * *

 

This time, Ben was able to prepare for being unconscious. As soon as the doctor slipped the anesthesia into his IV line, he gritted his teeth. While last time hadn’t been too bad- he’d gotten to meet his grandmother, after all- Ben wanted to be prepared in case he ended up in that strange dream-like world again. The last time he’d almost died, though. This time, he was aware that he was going to lose consciousness. Maybe the whole between-life-and-death thing only worked when he didn’t know when it was going to happen. As he felt his eyelids grow heavy, he couldn’t help but wonder if he would come back this time.

When he opened his eyes, he was back on that strange, ruined planet, but he wasn’t in the bombed-out wreckage of the medical bay like he had been the last time. Instead, he seemed to be standing on the outskirts of what remained of a city. People eyed him warily from the remains of doorways, glared at him from the flaps of makeshift tents, and glared at him as they picked through the rubble. None of them seemed like they intended to attack him, though, which was more than he could say about the last time.

Suddenly, a young boy- he couldn’t have been much older than six or seven years old- ducked out of what seemed like it had once been a storefront and accosted him. Ben tried not to recoil at the boy’s appearance- he was wearing a small military-style uniform not unlike that of the First Order itself, but that wasn’t the disturbing thing. The left side of the boy’s body, including his face, was covered with burn scars and his throat bore ligature marks. If this was still the strange afterlife Ben had found before, and this child was dead, it seemed whoever had killed him had tortured him first.

And it was the strangest thing, but Ben could have sworn he’d seen the child somewhere before. But that was impossible- the boy’s uniform looked like it was from the First Order, but it clearly wasn’t. That meant he must have been attending the Imperial Academy for his early schooling- he would have died before Ben was born. It wasn’t possible for him to have seen the boy before.

But the boy didn’t seem to notice, or care, about the state he was in. He hurried up to Ben, dirty-blond hair bouncing as he ran, revealing a blaster-bolt wound in the boy’s head. “Are you Ben Solo?” he asked.

“Yes…” Ben replied hesitantly.

“Please come with me,” the boy said. “My elder sister wishes to speak with you.”

* * *

 

The boy led Ben through the wreckage, deeper into the city, until they came to a relatively intact house. The boy stepped through the empty doorframe, motioned for Ben to follow him, and then led him deeper into the heart of the structure.

“Sister! I’ve brought him here, like you asked,” he called before stepping into a room and waving his arm lazily in invitation for Ben to follow him.

Sitting in the middle of the room, on a torn sofa, was a woman. She might have been pretty once, Ben thought- but the trail of blood leaking from the side of her mouth, her stringy, graying hair that fell limply in front of milky, damaged eyes, and the disgusted expression that twisted what remained of her face ruined what residual beauty she might have once retained.

As he looked at the woman, Ben realized with a jolt why the boy seemed so familiar. On the woman, it was even more obvious. She might not have had the bright coppery hair that Hux had, but the rest of her features were very similar to the man he knew. With a sinking feeling, Ben realized he must have been looking at Hux’s mother.

“Bring him closer, Nico,” she said quietly. The boy nodded to Ben, who hesitantly took a step forward. “Come on, boy, step closer. I’m not going to bite you.” She laughed bitterly. “You’d taste terrible, what with your contaminated blood and everything.”

Ben bristled, but did as she ordered. The woman reached her hand out, and Ben hesitated before taking it. Was that what she wanted?

“I should hate you, you know,” the woman who looked so much like Hux said, almost conversationally. “You are the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo, aren’t you? The proud son of the Rebellion fighters, turned Resistance? I know you met my brother Nico- they killed him. He was seven years old and they killed him like he wasn’t even human. Not your parents, of course, they were too ‘noble’ for that,” she said sarcastically. “But the rest of the Rebellion? They didn’t care who they killed, all they cared about was exterminating the rest of the Empire. I only escaped because I’d already gotten married to that worthless waste of space I called my husband,” she continued. “Not that it did me any good, I was caught in a New Republic bombing run on the refugee camp we lived in when I was pregnant, and it took my eyesight.” At this, she cackled, and pointed a long finger towards her own face. “I can’t even see a few inches in front of me. That one I can definitely place the blame on your mother, she was the one that ordered the run. But I don’t think you were born yet at that point.” 

“I’m… sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Ben said, for lack of anything better to say. The woman smirked.

“That’s kind of you. But as I said, you weren’t born yet, and truth be told it wasn’t even your wretched mother who put me here. But ah, I’ve been rude, you must be confused. Allow me to introduce myself. Moa Tarkin-Hux, at your service.”

“You’re… Hux’s mother?” Ben guessed.       

“Smart boy, I can see why you fascinated Snoke so much, although that’s not a fate I’d wish on anyone. But enough about me. I know why you’re here. Word gets around when you’re dead, you know. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do. Your grandmother told you why you needed to stay alive, right? So what are you doing back here? If you’re dead and you’ve left my son on his own I’m going to beat your ass whether I can see you or not.”

“I don’t think I’m dead…” Ben replied. “Unless something went wrong with the surgery….” He let his voice trail off.

“No, you’re alive,” the boy who’d brought him to this place said. “You’re still sort of see-through. You’d be solid if you were dead.”

“Good,” Moa said. “You must live on. Your grandmother would have given you a bunch of pretty words about why you need to survive for the good of the galaxy. Truth be told I don’t care about the galaxy. I called you here because I can sense that you’re a fighter. You have to survive to kill the bastards that killed me, tried to kill you, and will kill my son if given half a chance. You’re a smart boy, you’ve likely figured it out how I died.”

Ben was silent for a moment, taking in the woman’s appearance. From the trail of blood that still leaked from the corner of her mouth and the amount of blood that splattered down the front of her dress, it looked as though she’d died of a lung hemorrhage. And then what she’d just said registered.

“The Supreme Leader killed you.”

Moa let out another grating cackle. “Indeed he did, I advised that bastard husband of mine not to trust him, and he infected me with something. I don’t know the Force works, it’s too much mystical crap for me, but I do know that I felt something physically pushed into my lung one day, and after that, I became ill. It was slow going, but I faded over time, much like you did.” She smiled bitterly. “It’s too late for me. But you survived the hemorrhage that was meant to kill you and discovered the cause of your illness. You can and you must survive, Ben Solo. Not for the sake of the galaxy- the galaxy can go hang for all I care- but for the sake of yourself and my son. You know what you have to do, don’t you?”

It was surprisingly easy once the woman put it that way. “Kill Snoke,” Ben said flatly.

“And if you can manage it, send my worthless husband down here too,” Moa replied, baring her teeth in a feral grin that was made no less disturbing by the fact she aimed it in completely the wrong direction. “I’ve waited a long time to have a chat with him where he can’t use my health against me.”

Ben was not sure how to respond to that. But he was saved from having to come up with an answer by Moa continuing on. “I really shouldn’t approve. After all, you’re the spawn of the scum who killed my family and blinded me, but even so I still hate you less than Snoke and my husband. And my Tarkin seems to care for you. Everyone tells me what he’s up to, and ever since he heard your voice that night from the computer, you’ve given him something productive to focus on. I suppose I approve. My sister-in-law was telling me that when he found your cot empty my poor son panicked. Live on, kill the Supreme Leader and that useless lump I called husband, and look after my son, will you? And if I find you back here before that’s done I swear I’ll figure out how to force a soul to be reincarnated and I’ll send you back to be born on some wretched desert planet or something.”

“Yes ma’am,” Ben replied quickly, not wanting to upset her. He was dubious as to whether or not she would actually be able to hurt him, but he assumed it was probably in his best interest to not annoy the deceased, especially given that the deceased seemed to be watching him all the time. Moa laughed loudly.

“Boy, I’m dead. I’m not a ma’am anymore, if I ever even was. Call me Moa. Or Mama if you’d prefer,” she said with a grin.

“Oh, ah… no, that’s alright ma’am. Uh. Moa,” Ben said uncomfortably. Moa smirked.

“Oh you poor thing, I wish you’d been born to me instead of to Leia Organa! You’re a good boy, Ben Solo. Now it’s time for you to wake.”

“Wha-?” Ben didn’t have a chance to react before he felt himself drift away from the room, fading in and out like a badly malfunctioning holodisk.

Once he was gone, the boy turned to Moa. “Do you think he’ll be able to do it, sister?”

Moa nodded. “We already knew he was strong in the Force. Tarkin is attached to him, and I think Ben is attached to Tarkin as well. I think at the very least, if he survives what’s next he has a very good chance of killing Brendol, at least.”

“And Snoke?”

“He’ll have to kill my bastard husband in order to get close to Snoke. If he can kill him, there’s a good chance he will be able to at least wound Snoke. If he accepts Tarkin’s help, I do think they’ll manage it.”

“Do you really want your son involved?”

“Tarkin has been involved since he went to the Academy, whether I like it or not,” Moa said grimly. “Those two boys are each other’s’ best chance for survival. I just hope that they’ll recognize that before it’s too late and solidify their union, no matter what form that happens to take.”


	6. Chapter 6

Despite his rapid departure from that strange not-quite-world, Ben took a while to regain consciousness completely- probably a side effect of the drugs they'd used to knock him out in order to conduct the surgery. He felt himself drifting- sort of there one moment, somewhere else the next. Finally, he was able to focus his vision and keep his eyes open long enough for the monitors to register that he'd regained consciousness, and almost immediately, the doctors were on him like carrion-birds on a corpse.  
  
“It's very strange,” Doctor Arkkriss said, shaking her head once she realized Ben was awake. “When we did the test the first time, there was nothing there! When you asked us to re-run the test, we found a mass in your lung. And you were right- there was something in there. It's not anything I've ever seen before- how did you end up with a metal device in the interior of your lungs? It's not possible that you inhaled it.”  
  
“Mm,” was all Ben managed to say. His head still felt slushy, and his tongue rebelled against forming words. The doctor handed him a cup of ice chips, which he gratefully took.  
  
“You've been out for three days,” the doctor continued. “It wasn't a particularly difficult surgery, and we didn't use anything unusual medication-wise on you, but your body... well, it was almost like your lung did not want to let go of the device we found. I was worried you wouldn't wake up, that we'd accidentally sent you into shock.”  
  
Now _that_ was news to Ben. He'd been out for three days? It seemed like he'd spent maybe twenty minutes at the most talking to Hux's mother. Maybe time worked differently when you were dead. “..three days?” he managed to rasp out. Doctor Arkkriss nodded.  
  
“Don't worry too much,” she replied. “Once that thing was out of you, your vitals were fine and you seemed relatively stable. Your body likely just needed the rest to recover from whatever that thing was. It didn't stop General Hux from panicking, though. He was here whenever he wasn't on duty, and we almost had to ban him from the medbay, since he kept trying to get poor Lieutenant Mitaka to keep an eye on you when he couldn't. As though the lieutenant isn't here for medical treatment too!” The woman snorted, shaking her head. “I'll leave you to it- I'll be back in half an hour to check on you. Suck on those ice chips, though, your mouth must be very dry.”  
  
Hux had been looking out for him while he was out, and he was concerned enough to make the medical bay staff consider barring him from entry? Ben couldn't figure out why. Ever since that night when he'd accidentally transmitted his voice, Hux had been a constant, meddling presence in his life, and even if you held a blaster to his head and demanded an answer as to why, Ben wouldn't have been able to tell you. He was nobody! He was supposed to be dead! Hux actually had duties, a life, and things to live for. Why was he so obsessed with Ben's well-being?  
  
Actually, now that he thought about it, there was something strange about how Moa had reacted to him, too- almost like she was telling him to look after her son... but in a manner that was more than just mere acquaintances. Hadn't she even gone on to say that she shouldn't approve of their relationship because of who his parents were? That almost sounded like what a parent would say to their child's future spouse, or something like that. But that couldn't possibly be right. There wasn't anything there. Hux was probably just alarmed that he'd found a half-dead man on his ship, and Moa had as good as said that being dead was boring- she was probably just seeing things that weren't really there in an unconscious attempt to liven up her afterlife. There wasn't any other logical explanation for it.  
  
With those thoughts taking root in his mind, Ben finished his ice chips and drifted back into an uneasy sleep.

 

* * *

Hux's day just seemed to be going from bad to worse.  
  
To start off with, breakfast in the canteen had been Nylaxian oatmeal. Everybody hated Nylaxian oatmeal. Even Nylaxians. But since that damn transport ship had gotten blown up, Starkiller Base was running out of just about everything- building materials, soap, food that wasn't terrible... about the only things that were properly stocked were the medical supplies. Amazingly enough, other than Ben's case, there hadn't been too many complicated illnesses or injuries in the past few months. While it might have sounded terrible to say, it was in some ways a good thing that the construction accidents on the base tended to be immediately fatal- it prevented the injured person from holding on only to remain in great pain, and it prevented running up too much of a cost.  
  
But the more he thought about it in those terms, the more uncomfortable Hux became. Was that how his father had viewed his mother? Even before she had contracted the illness that took her life, she had not been in the best health- likely a result of being caught in the bombing run that had taken her eyesight. Who knew what being caught in the explosion had done to her body, even before she had become fatally ill? Hux remembered his mother as generally being cheerful and lively, at least when it came to him, but she did tend to tire easily. Had Commander Hux seen his wife and the mother of his son as a useless financial burden? The only time Hux ever saw his father strike his mother, he had thrown her to the ground while screaming at her about her weakness, her pathetic fear of the Resistance, and her recklessness in distrusting the Supreme Leader. But he also hadn't seen what went on between his parents when he wasn't around, and his mother did often need help that his father would provide- it was not a stretch of the imagination to realize that possibly his mother had been silently suffering under his father's cold and calculating personality, even if he never did hit her at any other time.  
  
Hux found himself wondering- was that how he came off to his men? Was he a distant, unapproachable figure with a personality colder than the outside temperature? He didn't really mean to be- but it might just have been his nature. While people said he did tend to look a bit like his mother, except for the hair, he had always viewed his father as a powerful authority figure, and had tried to model his own behavior on him. But now that he thought about it- was that really such a good idea? If his suspicions were correct, and Snoke had murdered his mother- how much knowledge did has father have of that? Had he been complicit? The implications were unsettling.  
  
While he was mulling over these disturbing thoughts, his datapad beeped twice in rapid succession. The first was a message from the medical bay- Dopheld Mitaka had recovered enough from his bout with the Kuyper pox and risk of transmission was low enough that he was being discharged in order to finish his recuperation in his own quarters- all he'd have to do was make sure to take the pills the doctors had prepared for him to kill off any remaining pathogens that might have been lurking around in his system. The message also went on to inform him that they had completed surgery on Ben, removed a strange metallic object from his lung, and that they were cautiously optimistic that when he completely regained consciousness he would begin to show marked improvement.  
  
The second message had been sent to all command officers on all major ships within the First Order. A small cargo vessel delivering supplies to an Outer Rim planet stumbled across one of the star destroyers- the _Annihilator_ , floating in space, seemingly dead. Concerned, the crew had docked with the ship and gone aboard to investigate.  
  
Every single person, from the lowest maintenance worker right on up to the general in charge of the ship, was dead. Seemingly from coughing up blood.

Horrified, he clicked through the images attached to the message. While it was impossible to tell from the images alone what had caused the carnage, none of the corpses showed any sign of external damage, and Hux couldn’t look away. One image showed a Stormtrooper lying face-up in a puddle of his own congealed blood, the source of which seemed to be his nose and mouth. Another, a glassy-eyed petty officer slumped over her console, which had gotten the brunt of the blood flow from her mouth. Two IT technicians, who seemed to have been trying to comfort each other in their last moments, their death spasms locking them into each other, unable to tell where the blood from one ended and the blood from the other began. A medical officer, collapsed on his side, the surgical mask he’d been wearing dyed completely red. A lieutenant who’d died in the bath still sitting nude in the tub, the water turned red with blood that poured from her mouth.  
  
The image album went on and on, getting more graphic and disturbing as the images wore on. It appeared that whatever had caused this had happened very suddenly- so many pictures showed people who’d been going about their mundane daily lives when they’d met their end unexpectedly, and through such a bizarre mechanism. Death wasn’t exactly unheard of in the line of duty for First Order members, but death from disease, or whatever this was, _was_ fairly unusual. Certainly on a massive scale like this.  
Clicking back to the original text of the message, Hux skimmed through, looking for anything that might have made more sense, or at least provided an explanation, but he came up empty.  
  
_“…no external trauma was visible on any of the bodies…”_  
  
_”…no known survivors at this time…”_  
  
_”…medical officers from both the_ Exonerator _and the_ Rectifier _conducted autopsies on a random sample of victims from across rank, age, and gender. Autopsies did not reveal anything that would serve as a definitive cause of death, although all cases did show extensive damage to the internal organs, especially the lungs and linings of the nasal cavities…”_  
  
_”…no known pathogens or chemical agents match the damage seen in these bodies…”_  
  
_”…incident is being recorded as a climate control system malfunction; other ships are advised to monitor their climate control systems closely and evacuate if errors arise.”_  
  
Hux stared as he read that last line. A climate control system malfunction? What kind of idiots did they take him for? Climate control was one of the most stable technologies that existed- that had existed for hundreds, probably thousands of years. It just was simply impossible to be a space-faring society without useful climate systems. The idea that one would fail so catastrophically and kill everyone onboard a _Star Destroyer, of all things_ was simply absurd. Clearly something else was going on there.  
  
His first thought was that it must have been an insidious plot by the Resistance. He knew that the organization’s precursor, the Rebellion, did not think twice about murdering children or ordering airstrikes on refugee camps- his Uncle Nico had been in his first year at the Imperial Academy and they’d killed him, hadn’t they? And hadn’t his mother been injured in a New Republic bombing run? But then logic reasserted itself. Despite what had happened before he was born, he logically knew that the Resistance most likely was not likely to resort to biological weapons- there was too much room for error (and the possibility of infecting yourself). And they also did not seem to approve of indiscriminate attacks like that, instead preferring to use precise strikes to remove whatever they deemed to be a threat at that time.  
  
Granted, it was possible that the Resistance had deemed the crew of the _Annihilator_ to be a threat that merited quick removal, but somehow Hux still doubted it was something they had done. It just didn’t seem their style.  
  
But that left even more troubling questions about who or what had caused the deaths. And maybe it was simply the fact he’d met Ben, who claimed to have been tortured through a purposely-induced, protracted illness that had the same symptoms, but somehow Hux couldn’t stop his suspicions from turning bit by bit towards the Supreme Leader.  
  
Still, that made even less sense than an attack by the Resistance. Why would the Supreme Leader attack his own people?

* * *

Commandant Brendol Hux sighed as he put down his datapad. Like all officers of the First Order, he’d gotten the message containing the images and official explanation of the death of the crew of the _Annihilator _.__ Unlike other officers of the First Order, however, he knew the truth behind the strange deaths.  
  
Truly, it was regrettable. But it had been necessary. Just more in a long line of regrettable but necessary deaths. His cadets, countless Stormtroopers, Moa… everything had been for the good of the Empire or the First Order.  
  
It was regrettable, the case of the Annihilator. Lieutenant General Matthias had been a truly promising young man- perhaps if he hadn’t gone poking his nose into where it didn’t belong he would have gone on to beat the Commandant’s own son as the youngest full general in the Order. Unfortunately, the young man hadn’t had the sense to know when to leave something well enough alone, and his entire crew had paid the price for it. At least it had been a successful test of the Supreme Leader’s plan. Now that they knew it was feasible, they might not even have to bother with completing Starkiller Base.  
  
Of course, if it wasn’t necessary to complete the base, his son’s role would be entirely superfluous, and the First Order didn’t get to where it was by keeping superfluous personnel around… or even alive.  
  
It was regrettable, truly, it was. But sacrifices were necessary for the good of the Order, and Brendol had been rather unhappy with his son as of late. If Tarkin was really worthy of his status, the boy would have finished the weapon more quickly and such drastic measures would not have been necessary. Like Moa, Tarkin had always been a little too cautious when it came to what was necessary. Oh, both Moa and her son had talked a good talk, but when it came down to it, both were hesitant to actually make a final decision, or to make the proper moves. It had cost Moa her life, but Brendol had hoped that Tarkin wouldn’t fall into the same trap. Reaching general rank at his age had been a good sign, but the Starkiller was now behind schedule, and now that the Supreme Leader had perfected his technique of releasing biological contaminants directly into the bloodstream of individuals via the Force, without needing a physical locus, the Starkiller was obsolete.  
  
It was regrettable, but it was how victory was achieved. 

 


End file.
